ENG 452 - Modernism

Semester Hours: 4

In her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf declared that: “In or about December 1910, human nature changed…. All human relations…shifted–those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” The writers we will read-Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larson–all engaged actively in the debates over what literature should be and were breaking new ground in poetry and the novel through formal experimentation, such as stream-of-consciousness, temporal disruption, multiple points of view, and the reshaping of relationships between self and “other.” These writers sought to re-define reality in the 20th century and re-examine the role of the artist within that society. We will explore these issues within the context of not only what was happening in narrative as well as poetry, but what was happening in art, architecture, music, and philosophy. Modern writers were influenced by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the paintings of Picasso and Georges Braque, Stravinsky’s music, jazz, popular culture, women’s suffrage, and, of course, the First World War.